Marcos Nährhttp://marcos.nahr.com.br
digital experienceTue, 04 Nov 2014 01:15:19 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1Beauty as a source of valuehttp://marcos.nahr.com.br/beauty-as-a-source-of-value/
http://marcos.nahr.com.br/beauty-as-a-source-of-value/#commentsWed, 18 Jul 2012 16:51:08 +0000http://marcos.nahr.com.br/?p=1875
Beauty is an important ingredient of our daily lives. We admire and praise the beauty of nature, architecture, music, other people… Given its pervasiveness, the lack of research addressing aesthetics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is striking. ~Marc Hassenzahl

Obviously, beauty is a source of value. In one study, participants saw and rated pictures of two different toasters. While being equal in function, the toasters differed in beauty. Among other things, participants were asked to state their willingness to pay for both toasters. On average, participants were willing to spend $37.20 on the beautiful toaster, but only $24.05 on the not so beautiful toaster. In other words, beauty was worth $13.16, i.e. an increase of about 55%.

Although the notion that beauty adds value seems intuitive, studies reveal a more complex picture. Whether beauty adds value can depend on individual or situational aspects. In the toaster study already mentioned above, it was identified an individual difference, the so-called centrality of visual product aesthetics (CVPA), as an important moderator of beauty’s value. CVPA subsumes three aspects: Value, acumen and response. Individuals with a high CVPA attach personal value to beauty (e.g., “Beautiful product designs make our world a better place to live”); they think of themselves as connoisseurs, able to perceive the subtlest differences in beauty (e.g., “I see things in a product’s design that other people tend to pass over”) and they strongly respond to beautiful things (e.g., “If a product’s design really ‘speaks’ to me, I feel that I must buy it”). High CVPA individuals are more prone to use a visual style of processing, they more strongly desire to acquire objects that only few others possess, and the acquisition of beautiful objects becomes a central pursuit of their lives closely linked to happiness and success. In the toaster study, CVPA moderated the overall evaluation, purchase intention and the willingness to pay for the two products. Whereas for low CVPA individuals neither evaluation nor purchase intention varied significantly as a function of beauty, it made a large difference for high CVPA individuals. The same pattern but not as pronounced was also apparent for willingness to pay. On average, high CVPA individuals were willing to pay $40.09 for the beautiful toaster; low CVPA individuals paid only $34.32.

This study demonstrated individual differences in the importance we attach to beauty and consequently in the value beautiful objects have. Besides those individual differences, situational aspects can determine whether beauty is valued or not. Ben-Bassat, Meyer, and Tractinsky (2006), for example, attempted to measure the perceived value of beauty and usability by the help of an auction mechanism. Participants first used and rated versions of a software for text input, which differed in their usability and beauty. In the second part of the study, participants were required to perform a task, i.e. to input items with the help of the software. Task performance (number of items) was monetarily rewarded. Before the task, participants were asked to place a bid on the version of the software, they would like to use for the input task. Successful bidders were allowed to use the preferred version of the software for the task. Bids had to be paid in real money. Interestingly, bids differed largely for the medium and high usability version (NIS 6.54 [approx. €1] and NIS 20.71 [approx. €3.50], respectively), but virtually no difference was found for the less and more beautiful versions. Participants even seemed to pay slightly less for the beautiful, high usability version than for the less beautiful, high usability version of the software. Thus, whether beauty has value depends on the context the product is used in. In a highly efficiency-oriented context (as in Ben-Bassat’s study), individuals do not seem to place much value on beauty. In an unpublished study, Dieter Rhode and I further explored the impact of situational cues on the centrality of beauty. We presented a number of laptop desktops, which were meant to differ in beauty and usability. Each participant rated the usability of each desktop (4 items, e.g., easy to use, concise), their beauty (4 items, e.g. well-formed, beautiful look) and their overall adequacy (i.e. not adequate – adequate). However, participants received different background stories for their rating task. One group was told to imagine that they must later use the laptop for correcting a faulty and badly designed PowerPoint presentation under time pressure. The second group was told to imagine using the laptop for a series of important conference talks. The third group was told that the desktop would be installed on their own personal laptop. As expected, in the first group (revision of the presentation), the usability ratings were the single best predictor and explained 58% of the adequacy judgments’ variance. The further inclusion of beauty into the regression model explained only additional 9% of the variance (67% in total). Albeit significant, it seems fair to conclude that beauty did not play much of a role for the adequacy judgments in this group. This was different for the second group (conference talks). Usability remained the single best predictor, but explained only 28% of the total variance. If beauty was added to the model, explained variance was increased by 20% (48% in total). In the last group (own laptop), beauty was the best predictor and explained 17% of the total variance. Usability added another 17% (34% in total). Thus, for a highly task-related context (group 1, revision of the presentation) beauty played only a minor role, which changed clearly given the context emphasizing self-presentation (group 2, conference talks) or personal identity (group 3, own laptop). In these cases, beauty mattered.

All in all, beauty can add value to a product. The magnitude of this effect is likely to be moderated by personal as well as situational aspects. Some, more visually oriented individuals may value beauty more than others. In addition, task- and efficiency-oriented contexts may call for less importance of beauty than, for example, social contexts.

In galleries and museums, curators use judgment and a refined sense of style to select and arrange art to create a narrative, evoke a response, and communicate a message. As the digital landscape becomes increasingly complex, and as businesses become ever more comfortable using the web to bring their product and audience closer, the techniques and principles of museum curatorship can inform how we create online experiences—particularly when we approach content.

Bloggers can also be considered as curators and experts of a particular subject, hand-picking others’ assets around a particular theme or topic and then layering in their own distinct voice.

When a site launches, your audience arrives to learn more about what you know most about. It’s critical to create a content experience with purpose, that is consistent and contextual. This helps to assert your brand’s authority, establishes relationships with your audience, and secures a return visit based on your content’s value. The content strategist-as-curator is the one who makes this happen.

UX thesis is a digital curation website.
The aim of this project is to establish and develop long term repositories of User Experience digital assets (thesis, papers, workshop papers, book chapters, reports) for current and future reference by researchers, scientists, historians, and scholars.

]]>http://marcos.nahr.com.br/ux-thesis-digital-curation/feed/0On the art of choosinghttp://marcos.nahr.com.br/on-the-art-of-choosing/
http://marcos.nahr.com.br/on-the-art-of-choosing/#commentsFri, 20 Jan 2012 17:47:39 +0000http://marcos.nahr.com.br/?p=1824Every day we make choices. Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go? These choices define us and shape our lives.

Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices — and how we feel about the choices we make. At TEDGlobal, she talks about both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones, and shares her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2010, July 2010 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 24:09)

It was fully booked several weeks before it happened. We had some press coverage, including contents broadcasted on the radio, in newspapers and trough the Internet. We have also sent invitations to professors and students in every Graduate Design Program in Brazil, as well as to Design Companies. The result was an auditorium crowded to its limit, filled with 180 people ready to see some lectures – specially the one from our keynote speaker, Pieter Desmet – and to take part in a workshop.

The result was an auditorium crowded to its limit, filled with 180 people

The morning started with a presentation from Leandro Tonetto, focused on describing what designing for emotions is and its main approaches.

Tonetto was followed by Marcos Nähr and his excellent set of experience-driven examples.

Filipe Campelo was the third speaker, and his lecture included a description about what has been done in Brazil in the field, and also a research agenda.

The morning ended with an inspiring presentation from Pieter Desmet, who said that designing should be seen as an “act of love”, and spread some impressive ideas on Design for Happiness.

We consider this first Brazilian Seminar as a succes! We can’t wait to see the following events!

]]>http://marcos.nahr.com.br/1st-brazilian-seminar-on-design-emotion/feed/0How Communities Differ from Teamshttp://marcos.nahr.com.br/how-communities-differ-from-teams/
http://marcos.nahr.com.br/how-communities-differ-from-teams/#commentsThu, 29 Dec 2011 10:16:29 +0000http://marcos.nahr.com.br/?p=1796Communities of practice are different from teams, though less so as originally thought.

Like successful teams, successful communities have goals, deliverables, assigned leadership, accountability for results, and metrics. But they are distinct from teams in four ways:

1. The long view
Communities are responsible for the long-term development of a body of knowledge or discipline, even when they have annual goals. Teams, in contrast, focus on a specific deliverable.

2. Peer collaboration and collective responsibility
Community leaders establish the direction of the community, connect members, and facilitate discussions, but do not have authority over members.

3. Intentional network expansion
Professionals typically consult their peers for help with unusual or difficult technical problems. Communities deliberately seek to expand the internal and external resources and experts available to individuals.

4. Knowledge management
Teams typically do not have ongoing responsibility for organizing and documenting what a company has learned in a domain; rather, they focus on a given problem. Communities steward the knowledge in their domain with a view toward solving problems that have not yet been discovered.

At many companies, employees form groups to share knowledge and attack common problems. These communities of practice can be a powerful management tool.

When communities of practice first began to appear, everybody hailed them as a dirt-cheap way to distribute knowledge and share best practices. It was thought that they would be relatively self-organizing and self-sustaining, flying below the radar of organizational hierarchy.

Companies thought they would flourish with little executive oversight—a notion that seemed to work well at the time. But as life and business have become more complex, we began to see that to make a difference over the long term, communities needed far more structure and oversight.

Despite this, communities remain more efficient and cheaper than other organizational resources and demand less oversight. In times when budgets have shrunk and managers are overwhelmed just dealing with the downturn, communities can be a valuable resource for coordinating work across organizational boundaries, whether across geography, across operating groups, or down the value stream.

But communities are not as informal as it was once thought, nor are they free. Though IT systems make global collaboration possible, successful communities need more. They need the human systems—focus, goals, and management attention—that integrate them into the organization. And they need to operate efficiently enough to respect experts’ scarce time.

]]>http://marcos.nahr.com.br/how-communities-differ-from-teams/feed/0Design Thinking Processhttp://marcos.nahr.com.br/design-thinking-process/
http://marcos.nahr.com.br/design-thinking-process/#commentsTue, 27 Dec 2011 17:13:00 +0000http://marcos.nahr.com.br/?p=1786The processes that Design Thinking follows can be best described as developing deep consumer insights, rapid prototyping and seeking radical innovation as well as empowering teams to be innovative.

The first goal of Design Thinking is to understand what is meaningful to consumer and discover unarticulated needs. Next to bring clarity to the gathered data by producing rapid prototypes, using mock-ups, storyboards, storytelling method, user testing, and even by acting out concepts and services. The intent is to reduce the risk of failure and accelerate organizational learning as an iterative process.

Design thinking methodology consists of three phases. While some call them gears, Tim Brown has named them as the ‘Phases of the Innovation Process: Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation’.

I. Inspiration

The inspiration phase requires different sets of skills and methods to achieve market insights, contrary to traditionally market researches and surveys that most of the practitioners used to apply. In order to formulate problem statements, designers look to people’s behaviour for the insights they need. Specifically, observation and empathy are the complementary elements of the inspiration phase. These newly offered methods can be considered as more ethnographic, qualitative methods, that designers tend to use to help explore and generate new ideas.

Empathy can be explained as putting yourself into the customer’s shoes in order to understand not only the physical experiences of consumers, but also cognitive and emotional experiences. In addition, observation is the other important element of inspiration phase of Design Thinking. Observing the actual experiences of people in their regular daily lives can yield valuable hints to discover their unspoken needs.

As a successful chief designer of an American company once stated, “The minute you start analyzing and using consumer research, you drive all the creativity out of the product”, he adds “No good product was ever created from quantitative market research. Great products spring from the heart and soul of a great designer, unencumbered by committees, processes or analyses”. Arguments of Brown and Katz state clear support for his remark: “Traditional techniques such as focus groups and surveys, which in most cases simply ask people what they want, rarely yield important insights”.

II. Ideation Phase: Building to Think

Ideation is the second proposed phase of Design Thinking and its main element is brainstorming. As important as brainstorming is, generating game-changing ideas through divergent and convergent processes and building interdisciplinary teams, are also relevant for the success of ideation phase.

Design Thinking embodies both divergent and convergent thinking, which can also be described as analysis and synthesis. Incorporating these two distinctly thinking ways is basically a transition from creating and making choices to choosing amongst the alternatives that have been created through synthesis and divergent thinking. As is mentioned in Tim Brown’s book, Change by Design these are “the seeds of design-thinking, a continuous movement between divergent and convergent processes, on the one hand, and between the analytical and synthetic, on the other”.

An important distinction needed here to mention is, contrary to traditional project groups’ formations; Design Thinking mentions the importance of interdisciplinary groups instead of multidisciplinary ones. The reasons behind this are that in interdisciplinary groups everyone who takes place in the group shares the collective responsibilities, as is high-lightened by Coughlan and Prokopoff ‘’the design of the system is no longer contained in the head of a single individual or group- rather, it is emergent across multiple individuals or groups’’.

Nevertheless, it could be argued that having such a varied and rich source of disciplines can create problems to coordinate and integrate. However, as Tim Brown argues, brainstorming within interdisciplinary groups can produce faster and better ideas. Accordingly, creating prototypes is the other important contribution to Design Thinking.

Prototyping is a facilitator for brainstorming, as well as acquiring and improving ideas. As reinforced by Brown and Katz ‘’rapid prototyping allow us to make our ideas tangible faster so that we can evaluate, refine them and more importantly zero in on the best solution sooner’’.

As Coughlan and Prokopoff mentioned, prototyping can be useful for non- designers to experience design in a more tangible way before committing to a particular curse of action.

III. Implementation: Path from project room to the market

In the third and final phase of innovation; implementation, design-thinkers are mostly concerned with communicating an idea with ‘’sufficient clarity to gain acceptance across the organization, providing it, and showing that it will work in its intended market’’. However, many obstacles are usually presented at this stage; good ideas can be rejected by commercial restrictions or by a rigid organizational system. As is mentioned in Why Great Ideas Can Fail, “Successful products have to navigate a complex path. The idea and initial design is only one piece of the story”.

To mitigate this problem Tim Brown (2008) offers the story telling method; according to him, if organizations aim to increase the likeliness of survival of the idea, they need to address influential, clear, strong stories with their ideas. Well constructed, expertly communicated stories can help design thinkers to illustrate, show and build emotional links with the idea itself and the decision-makers to gain their commitment and support. With Tim Brown’s own words ‘’the human capacity for storytelling plays an important role in the intrinsically Human-Centred approach to problem solving’’.